With sinking heart, but bearing the calm front which never failed him, he led his starving, travel-worn band toward the California frontier. The natives made a feeble show of opposing their retreat. A host of ill-trained soldiery, formidable only in numbers, held the mountain heights; their Indian allies were drawn up on the plain to contest the passage. Colonel Melendrez, commanding the Mexican forces, sent four Indians with a flag of truce into the filibuster camp, bearing an offer of protection and free passage across the American border to all except the leader; Walker, with all the arms of the company, must be first given up. Such an offer would have been rejected, in the face of certain death, by men familiar as these were with the Punic faith of the Spaniard. Made as it was to men who had followed their chieftain through hunger and want, battle and defeat, up to this moment, when they could see their country's flag waving over the United States military camp across the border, it was treated with scornful laughter. Melendrez then begged the United States commander to interfere and compel the surrender, a request which, as it could not have been granted without a violation of Mexican territory, was properly refused. Three miles of road lay between the filibusters and the boundary line. Walker, resorting to strategy, left half a dozen men concealed behind some rocks to cover his retreat. The natives, with a wholesome dread of the American rifle, followed him at what seemed a safe distance and rode straight into the ambush. Half a dozen rifles emptied as many saddles, whereupon Melendrez and his Mexicans galloped off at full speed, leaving their Indian allies to follow as best they might. The filibusters lost one man, a victim to his own indiscretion in having borrowed a leaf from the enemy's tactics and fortified his courage with too much _aguardiente_. So ended the last battle of the Republic of Sonora--if it be not a travesty to call by the name of battle a fruitless fight between a score of men on one side and a hundred ignorant savages on the other. Four and thirty tattered, hungry, gaunt pedestrians, whimsically representing in their persons the president, cabinet, army and navy of Sonora, marched across the line and surrendered as prisoners of war to Major Mckinstry, U.S.A., at San Diego, California. It was the 8th of May, 1854; and so Walker kept his thirtieth birthday. A parole, pledging the prisoners to present themselves for trial to General Wool, at San Francisco, was signed by all, after which they were allowed to depart. Of those starving, wounded, battle-scarred survivors of several months' accumulated miseries the names signed to the parole contain at least six of men who had love for their leader, or enough of unconquerable daring, to send them, twelve months later, in search of fresh dangers and glories under the same commander.